Stellaris Dev Diary #370 - 4.0 Changes Part 4

[pttaylor]

I've not read all the comments but I have read the dev replies and haven't seen this addressed yet, so:

It seems to me that changing species traits from being a production modifier to being a workforce modifier changes the modifier into a *throughput* modifier, which is going to be much weaker for advanced resources in the early game. (In the late game, the benefit of being multiplicative with production modifiers almost certainly outweighs the extra input resource costs).
Relatedly, I assume Intelligent is now a workforce modifier on "Research" jobs, but I don't see how Natural Physicist/Engineer/Sociologist can be converted into workforce modifiers unless research jobs are themselves being split into 3 again

 

[Mole204]

Paradox had better be able to allow modpacks to remove Civilians. Para tries to be sneaky in screwing up what's known in subtle ways to trip up the players. I for one am fed up with it.

 

[M. Real]

Other users have already suggested "Dependents", which I think is better than "Underclass".

"Underclass" is I think too explicitly "lower", and not applicable for living standards like Shared Burdens or Utopian Abundance.

I did mention that in the post, including the option of "dependents". The only possible problem I can see with calling them dependents is that the term is typically associated with people dependent on family members, such as children or people with disabilities. It's also debatably not applicable for living standards where they receive no assistance at all, as they are not "depending" on anyone and basically just scraping by however they can.

That said, it is still a reasonably accurate descriptor and, to me, preferable over "civilian" as it is more specific. And as you said, it is technically a better descriptor than "underclass" for societies without social classes per se. I'm not sure which connotative problem I find more of an issue with between "underclass" and "dependents", but I think either could work.

 

[Lorenerd11]

"Underclass" is I think too explicitly "lower", and not applicable for living standards like Shared Burdens or Utopian Abundance.

Speaking of Shared Burdens, I think it would be appropriate at this point to remove Elite stratum Politician jobs from Shared Burdens empires and replace them with an amenities-producing Administrator job, similar to Worker Cooperative's Stewards.

Having explicit Elites in a Shared Burdens empire just feels wrong at this point.

 

[Shadowlyger]

Civilian is fine. Stop being pedantic.

Paradox had better be able to allow modpacks to remove Civilians. Para tries to be sneaky in screwing up what's known in subtle ways to trip up the players. I for one am fed up with it.

You probably can, but I'm not sure you'd want to under this system, as that stands a good chance of crippling the growth rate of your colonies and/or leaving you with a ton of unemployed pops at the start of the game.

 

[GnoSIS]

Dependants is the true name. Think of the same group for a gestalt or a machine empire, how would you call it? Hoi polloi or civilians doesn't make sense because it's the point of those that there isn't individuality.

With dependants though it doesn't assume anything, in the same sense that your arm depends on your shoulder. They are dependant drones, dependant machines.

 

[Shadowlyger]

Dependants is the true name. Think of the same group for a gestalt or a machine empire, how would you call it? Hoi polloi or civilians doesn't make sense because it's the point of those that there isn't individuality.

With dependants though it doesn't assume anything, in the same sense that your arm depends on your shoulder. They are dependant drones, dependant machines.

As a gestalt they're called maintenance drones.

 

[Toby-wan_Strife]

Also, if Clerks are being replaced by Civilians, will the old Clerk generating buildings and districts now provide bonuses to Civilians instead? Even if Clerks weren’t particularly good, I do value having some sort of mechanical representation of those parts of the economy that exist beyond the bureaucracy and the various parts of the war machine.

Civilians getting their own bonuses would be good. I think a good one would be planetary construction speed. At the moment it seems that buildings and districts just build themselves because construction workers simply don't exist. Granted, one could argue that there is some degree of automation within spacegoing empires beyond the AI techs and robots. But even on pre-FTL worlds it seems that buildings just build themselves.

 

[Lorenerd11]

Dependants is the true name. Think of the same group for a gestalt or a machine empire, how would you call it? Hoi polloi or civilians doesn't make sense because it's the point of those that there isn't individuality.

With dependants though it doesn't assume anything, in the same sense that your arm depends on your shoulder. They are dependant drones, dependant machines.

Dependents is a good name for individualistic pops that found themselves in a gestalt empire (since they cannot really contribute to the collective), but the gestalt version of that stata will be Maintenance Drones.

 

[M. Real]

On the topic of removing the growth floor (and possibly ceiling as well?), this makes the logistic growth curve more important. It's currently difficult to determine the effect of planetary capacity, and how exactly it impacts growth. In fact, you have to mouse over the size number on the planet screen just to even see the capacity! It should be more clear to the player at what point the population would benefit from adding more housing, and what the effect would be.

I think the dream, for me, would be if the game actually shows you the curve so that you can clearly visualize it. That might be a bit much though. I would settle for being shown how much over/under optimal capacity usage a planet is currently at, and how much that is impacting the growth rate.

Also, I think it's a bit weird to have housing and capacity as separate mechanics, as they essentially do the same thing (that is, limit population growth). I think it would be more sensible to roll housing and capacity into one mechanic (also, this could make housing usage reduction more useful if ends up as capacity usage reduction, since at the moment it's very easy to not have to worry about housing).

 

[Ryuplaneswalker]

"Civilian Jobs"

Also known as Coffee Baristas.

 

[Gyges Skyeye]

Clerks are dead! Long live Civilians!​

We’re currently still experimenting with the effects Living Standards have on Civilians (and Pops in general) - it’s likely that more of the Trade generation from Living Standards will be shifted to the Civilian stratum, and production from Unemployed Pops in the old system may also move to the Civilians. This will give them some of the functions of Clerks in the old economic model. In Gestalt empires, they are likely going to be outright named Maintenance Drones rather than “Civilians”.

We’re also renaming the Ruler stratum to “Elites”, so “Ruler” isn’t double-dipping between your Empire’s ruler at the top economic stratum.

I think that it would be somewhat of a missed opportunity to not further modify the gameplay loops.

Making Civilians just produce 'trade' as a resource seems to me like a cop out. They should consume it. Trade is supposed to be the logistical infrastructure and lift capacity of your empire. In real world economies, that is the planes, trains, cargo ships etc, moving around all your consumer goods to be consumed. It's that fleet of amazon delivery trucks driving around passing out packages. But if your mail service is delivering letter mail, it can't be out delivering bullets at the same time. Real empires experience this tension. And you see them have to shift from a peace time to wartime economy to fight and sustain a conflict. It also is why smaller populations who become more highly militarized can field more manpower to fight with than ones with larger, but more civilian populations. That can drive asymmetric victories vis-a-vis pure demographic and population count.

We should bring these tensions into Stellaris as gameplay loops.

--

Further, having Civilians consume trade (to receive consumer goods, etc) leaves a gameplay and mechanical role for the merchant class jobs, including clerks (or a renamed variant). Those jobs then become representative of the fraction of your labor force employed in logistical based occupations. The merchant job might be more equivalent to the business owners and middle management who have to coordinate deliveries of goods to keep the lights at the grocery store running. Even as you still need the stocking clerks (or robots) to go put the items on the shelves.

--

Even further, this type of system of civilian to military type economies, and potentially excessive consumer goods demanding living standards, gives us a wonderful mechanical way to represent, tune, and when necessary, utterly unleash the fallen empires.

(A further post below will detail how to do the Unity resource's reenvisionment as something of 'state capacity + zeitgeist gusto'. But for now, what we covered so far should suffice.)

Basically, fallen empires are ones where the state capacity (total fraction of (specialists/non-"civilian") + (military/government jobs) ) has withered away to be very low in relation to the civilian pop count of the state. So all resources like trade capacity are being funneled into maintaining civilian needs, not those of military, expansion, or science.

But if Fallen Empires get pushed off that balance, by attack, crisis, or what have you. Then that pendulum might swing to where suddenly their large latent population and productive capacity gets mobilized into resource surplus creating jobs again. Then that allows their military and economy to further spin up. In essence, contrasted with a doom loop of resources, the Fallen Empires should be prone to making a (to the) moon loop on their resources very rapidly once woken.

 

[Gyges Skyeye]

I would like to see unity become something of a currency towards getting stuff done. Call it a cat-herding currency if you will. It's kind of like, how driven your populace is, to follow and take part in the will of the state (the player's actions I guess.). Aka, state capcacity.

A more unified population might be more motivated to have higher workforce/laborforce participation. That shifts pops from producing civilians to producing workforce. But it should be civilians producing unity (when prodded by specialists like holo center entertainers, or politicians.). (Aka, civilian productivity of unity production is influenced by those state related jobs, being filled by the workforce.) (Civilians also would consume trade and their consumer goods upkeep to be "fed" enough to produce unity and be complacent. Hence during resource crunches, they should be naturally becoming grumpy, lowering your unity production and crashing you into complacency and civilian demands.)

This is a great thing, because the more civilians you drag into the workforce, the smaller your unity production base becomes. So we start seeing these cycles of boom and bust on unity production. And it's that unity pulse that allows us to take state level actions. It's like us the player getting to be the drunken sailor with a new paycheck. Have a fresh pile of unity laying around? Set about colonizing a new planet, draining unity stores rapidly in the process, until we see our empire go back to lazing on the couch for the next few years.

Same thing with wars. They can consume unity by various methods to keep running. Or have war exhaustion hit your unity productivity rate, precipitating the crash of unity, that will bring the war to a close. If the war's going good - ships killing other ships should be able to produce massive unity with proper civics or leader promotions, the populace is likely to stay unified behind it, heeding the state's orders or becoming more productive to aid the war cause. If the war is going terrible, and ship losses are costing unity, you might see your economy begin to crack.

Same thing for overheating your economy for raw resource production. Start sucking too many people into being miners, or soldiers for naval cap, and you run the risk of choking off unity production leading to culmination in your war capacity.

But if you got attacked or recently lost territory in a peace deal, you might have some huge levels of revanchism bonuses to unity production, letting you set your entire populace in motion to the state's directives in order to reclaim those lost star systems. And that might be well enough to locally outfight even a much larger, more complacent and placid, empire.

---

Further, this can extend into pop and faction ideology. Certain ideologies can have different labor force participation attitudes. And you might be wanting to promote different ideologies for different tasks, at different times -- all interspersed with periods of cultivating apathy to just have a complacent and happy populace when you need the breather.

And ideological or faction popularity can of course be influenced by external events and traumas foisted upon you as well. (Perhaps even tied to the lifespan of certain leaders, or fleets/ships who organize them)

 

[Gyges Skyeye]

Pop Growth​

Xeno-Compatibility will pool all species on a multi-species planet together to calculate their growth rate, then split the growth proportionally across the various species.

Full Xeno-Compatibility tradition tree or ascension path when?

One idea we have includes having Civilians create impromptu defensive militias to help defend their home, and possibly starting you off with a few Defensive Platforms. Another idea is for aggressively invaded Civilians to take “Resistance” Jobs that they must then “demote” out of over time. The number of Civilians converted to this new Job and how long it takes them to drop out of it would be modified depending on how their people are being treated by their new and old masters.

Going by real world events, "revanchism" and "existentialism" make for good vocabular choices to tackle and articulate these concepts. At least in so far as why civilians might be motivated enough to bother join a resistance job. If the revanchism is high, maybe you join the army. If the existentialism is high, you're probably just going right to the street in the fight to survive rather than wait and die.

(Guess some civics or ideologies might truly have existentialism flatlined to zero. There's certainly some empires, precursors, and crisis events in stellaris lore that would meet that mechanical implementation.)

 

[ItThatAltersSanity]

Business tycoon are what percentage of the population? I doubt we would even need to simulate them. They are so small in number there is hardly a point. But yes It isn't only private sector but just the majority of population that isn't dedicated to bringing direct amounts of resources to the state. so mainly private sector. How this works for mega corps is a little more uncertain, but stellaris has always existed in a amount of abstraction.

Mmm you have a point. So this "pop bucket" represents private sector entrepreneurs and employees who are much more open to hitting it big on an FTL job transfer than the other jobs. Not all may be underemployed gig workers desperately making ends meet or economically inactive basement dwellers.

A travel agency desk receptionist bored of the same old paperwork, a dentist with a hunting hobby, a builder looking for a challenge: people with stable incomes who want to live off-world, especially if someone else has already done the hard work of establishing a new colony's bare necessities. In an FTL civilisation, these people would be well informed on what exactly they're getting into by boarding the FTL shuttle.

In a MegaCorp, or more precisely, a small government build, the districts, buildings, policies, traditions, tech, etc should min/max so explicitly hiring miners is worse than having those pops work in the private sector then buying minerals off the pre-GM market. Bonus points if they can set automatic market transaction rules.

I think that it would be somewhat of a missed opportunity to not further modify the gameplay loops.

Making Civilians just produce 'trade' as a resource seems to me like a cop out. They should consume it. Trade is supposed to be the logistical infrastructure and lift capacity of your empire. In real world economies, that is the planes, trains, cargo ships etc, moving around all your consumer goods to be consumed. It's that fleet of amazon delivery trucks driving around passing out packages. But if your mail service is delivering letter mail, it can't be out delivering bullets at the same time. Real empires experience this tension. And you see them have to shift from a peace time to wartime economy to fight and sustain a conflict. It also is why smaller populations who become more highly militarized can field more manpower to fight with than ones with larger, but more civilian populations. That can drive asymmetric victories vis-a-vis pure demographic and population count.

We should bring these tensions into Stellaris as gameplay loops.

--

Further, having Civilians consume trade (to receive consumer goods, etc) leaves a gameplay and mechanical role for the merchant class jobs, including clerks (or a renamed variant). Those jobs then become representative of the fraction of your labor force employed in logistical based occupations. The merchant job might be more equivalent to the business owners and middle management who have to coordinate deliveries of goods to keep the lights at the grocery store running. Even as you still need the stocking clerks (or robots) to go put the items on the shelves.

This tension already exists in the form of alloys vs consumer goods. I view 4.0 trade to mean "space shuttles delivering things" instead of "ground-based delivery trucks". Moving goods from a factory to consumers living on the same planet is a much smaller effort than shipping over a hyperlane.

How I'd like your point implemented is a pop growth penalty when there's a lack of consumer goods and food. A hellbent military economy with dystopian slums for its civilians won't see much pop growth (high child mortality). Unless they conquer new pops, they will fall behind pure civilian economies. Extra points if armies require pops to make (and are more expensive than the cost of resettlement).

 

[Soranya]

I dont like the name "civilian".
This somehow implies that the others are military? goverment employes? - but that does not fit with various ethics and goverment fomrs etc.
i am not sure - but another name would be better.
(and yes this is just immersion)

 

[Shadowlyger]

I dont like the name "civilian".
This somehow implies that the others are military? goverment employes? - but that does not fit with various ethics and goverment fomrs etc.
i am not sure - but another name would be better.
(and yes this is just immersion)

I mean

All the other jobs are in fact government jobs, seeing as you, the government, are the one making them.

 

[Budu Dda]

This is correct, jobs are not required to need 100 workforce to fill.

So i have an interesting idea. What if we somehow (traditions, automation, technology, building or an composition of earlier suggestions (or script-based thingy)) made possible to change base workforce requirement for job to function at full capacity? For example supertall empires will employ 80 workforce instead of 100 but have 120-130% of upkeep (or any other debuff, such as happiness (which will further make situation worse)) and work only on an industry they chose (so minerals, food, alloys, etc) on a planet?

 

[ShaTiK]

Pop Groups and Workforce
As mentioned in Dev Diary 366, the Pop and Jobs system introduced in Stellaris 2.2 ‘Le Guin’ has always had significant performance implications in the late game, and we’ve been working on incremental improvements ever since. In the Stellaris 4.0 ‘Phoenix’ update, Pops will be grouped into Pop Groups based on species, strata, ethics, and faction, and these Pop Groups will produce Workforce that is used to fill (or partially fill) Jobs. As part of this change, we’re changing the overall scale of Pops - most things that previously affected or manipulated 1 Pop would now affect or manipulate groups of 100. The new systems can manipulate any number of Pops within a Pop Group just as easily as manipulating one, and I’ll go into some of the benefits of the finer resolution below.

Our primary desire with these changes is to improve late-game performance, but while working on it we took the opportunity to streamline some aspects of planetary management and improve the planet UI.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the details.

I want to check if my calculations are correct. I did a test run – default galaxy, some DLCs, pre-built Human race (xenophile variant).

Day 0 I have 32 POPs in my capital – under new system this would turn into 6 PG (pop group) + 2 for new civilian strata (both for egali and xenophile). Calculation vise we made 32 into 8 - making 4x reduction

Spoiler: table1

Old system conversion
Human ruler egalitarian
Human ruler xenophile

Human specialist egalitarian
Human specialist xenophile

Human worker egalitarian
Human worker xenophile

plus new strata

Human civilian egalitarian
Human civilian xenophile

Year 12 I got 38 POPs – now I have factions, but faction are identical to ethics at this point, so I would have the same 8 PGs. This gets us 4.75 reduction

Year 54 I got 52 POPs. Now I have one Human1 (without mysterious box genetic bonus) and one Photecian POPs. Also militarists made their appearance. If I understand it correctly (and I might not) it was stated that POPs get a 100x increase in 'size' - which would lead to every strata getting their own militarist representation pretty much as soon as I get some militarist attraction. Under the old system if ethic attraction is, say, 20%, it was entirely possible for some strata having no one being part of this particular ethic, now it seems everyone would be on the fun

So taking all of this into account we find ourselves with a pretty hefty PG number - 3 for each strata for humans, giving us 12 plus 6 each for human1 and our alien guests. This gets us 24 PGs in total. Suddenly we are down to 2.16 reduction in calculation

Spoiler: table2

Old system conversion gives us 15 PGs

Human ruler egalitarian
Human ruler xenophile
Human ruler militarist

Human specialist egalitarian
Human specialist xenophile
Human specialist militarist

Human worker egalitarian
Human worker xenophile
Human worker militarist

Human1 worker egalitarian
Human1 worker xenophile
Human1 worker militarist

Photecian worker egalitarian
Photecian worker xenophile
Photecian worker militarist

plus new strata and bigger POP size gives us 9 new PGs

Human civilian egalitarian
Human civilian xenophile
Human civilian militarist

Human1 civilian egalitarian
Human1 civilian xenophile
Human1 civilian militarist

Photecian civilian egalitarian
Photecian civilian xenophile
Photecian civilian militarist

This is all under pretty favorable conditions – capital, strong push towards governing ethics via agendas, only 2 starting ethics and singular species. Most notable gains are in lower tier strata, you consolidate tons of identical pops and they are calculated as a whole. As times goes on you get tons of specialists also. Very big planets, machine worlds, ecumenopoli, ring worlds - all these would benefit greatly. The caveat is that late game, with lots of various species and variants and factions a smaller size colony/space habitat might have as much PGs as it did POPs in current version. Capitals are absolute winners in this case, they would squish ethics/faction diversity thus lowering the number of PGs. Conversely remote colonies populated by POPs with governing attraction debuffs might see very little improvements since they would create tons of PGs.

Or my math is wrong?

 

[Shadowlyger]

I want to check if my calculations are correct. I did a test run – default galaxy, some DLCs, pre-built Human race (xenophile variant).

Day 0 I have 32 POPs in my capital – under new system this would turn into 6 PG (pop group) + 2 for new civilian strata (both for egali and xenophile). Calculation vise we made 32 into 8 - making 4x reduction

Spoiler: table1

Old system conversion
Human ruler egalitarian
Human ruler xenophile

Human specialist egalitarian
Human specialist xenophile

Human worker egalitarian
Human worker xenophile

plus new strata

Human civilian egalitarian
Human civilian xenophile

Year 12 I got 38 POPs – now I have factions, but faction are identical to ethics at this point, so I would have the same 8 PGs. This gets us 4.75 reduction

Year 54 I got 52 POPs. Now I have one Human1 (without mysterious box genetic bonus) and one Photecian POPs. Also militarists made their appearance. If I understand it correctly (and I might not) it was stated that POPs get a 100x increase in 'size' - which would lead to every strata getting their own militarist representation pretty much as soon as I get some militarist attraction. Under the old system if ethic attraction is, say, 20%, it was entirely possible for some strata having no one being part of this particular ethic, now it seems everyone would be on the fun

So taking all of this into account we find ourselves with a pretty hefty PG number - 3 for each strata for humans, giving us 12 plus 6 each for human1 and our alien guests. This gets us 24 PGs in total. Suddenly we are down to 2.16 reduction in calculation

Spoiler: table2

Old system conversion gives us 15 PGs

Human ruler egalitarian
Human ruler xenophile
Human ruler militarist

Human specialist egalitarian
Human specialist xenophile
Human specialist militarist

Human worker egalitarian
Human worker xenophile
Human worker militarist

Human1 worker egalitarian
Human1 worker xenophile
Human1 worker militarist

Photecian worker egalitarian
Photecian worker xenophile
Photecian worker militarist

plus new strata and bigger POP size gives us 9 new PGs

Human civilian egalitarian
Human civilian xenophile
Human civilian militarist

Human1 civilian egalitarian
Human1 civilian xenophile
Human1 civilian militarist

Photecian civilian egalitarian
Photecian civilian xenophile
Photecian civilian militarist

This is all under pretty favorable conditions – capital, strong push towards governing ethics via agendas, only 2 starting ethics and singular species. Most notable gains are in lower tier strata, you consolidate tons of identical pops and they are calculated as a whole. As times goes on you get tons of specialists also. Very big planets, machine worlds, ecumenopoli, ring worlds - all these would benefit greatly. The caveat is that late game, with lots of various species and variants and factions a smaller size colony/space habitat might have as much PGs as it did POPs in current version. Capitals are absolute winners in this case, they would squish ethics/faction diversity thus lowering the number of PGs. Conversely remote colonies populated by POPs with governing attraction debuffs might see very little improvements since they would create tons of PGs.

Or my math is wrong?

The number of pop groups you have doesn't actually matter in terms of number of calculations for jobs. Only the Workforce value matters.

From what I can see, as far as the game is concerned, each job type on a planet is one single job with its output and upkeep scaled based on how much Workforce is applied. Every single pop applied to that job could be its own pop group, it'd still be only one calculation because the job only cares about Workforce.